I haven't researched this much further so I hope it hasn't been covered before but possibly not as these are pretty new spec machines. The above machine, when I try to detect and boot as MD from a 10.04 (or 8.10) core does more or less the following-

Picks up the PXE server etc, no problem, reads basic image but then goes through a whole lot of screen stuff and stops at something which usually has the word "panic" in it. I found similar behaviour with my newish HP Probook 6560b (although I haven't tried on my latest 10.04 core).

My question(s) are-

How do I troubleshoot to establish what the problem(s) are. It looks like unsupported hardware but which part.... if I can establish that we may be able to fix it or at least document which hardware is not supported to assist others.

Are there logs I can look at if it only gets this far? I can screenshot (literally) what shows up at the panic stage and attach but the original error has probably scrolled off the screen at that stage.

At one stage I thought I saw complaints about the NIC... could it be that? I could try to find the chipset or whatever of the onboard NIC.

Another thought for troubleshooting was to try to run a 10.04 live CD and see if it has any issues.... if so, it could be a basic kubuntu 10.04 issue that can be addressed, if not, I could at least report the system-specs in a linux-kind-of-way....

Any advice, pointers?

And, while I'm in a verbose mode, might be nice to have a kind of a troubleshooting flowchart on the wiki for things like this... yes, I'm volunteering ;-)

Sweeeet, thanks. Can't believe I didn't check the wiki for that. Will try to sort that out this weekend. These aren't really my primary MDs.... I just have them so I try them and maybe it'll help someone else if I get them working.

Ok, so in between admiring my daughter's artwork an eating my lunch, I tried to sort out the PXE boot of the Sony Vaio. I'm suspecting the NIC... hardware is a Atheros AR8131 chipset which I'm lead to believe requires the atl1e kernel module similar to what's descirbed on the Unrecognized NIC wiki page.

But.... still no dice on the boot (even after modifying the modules file and recreating the initramfs). Of course I still don't know if it is certainly the NIC causing problems but it seems likely considering others have had this problem. I'll see if there are any tftboot logs or similar that can give more info. Maybe I should try windows standard maintenance procedure (reboot) on the router...